1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for searching a print target image to be printed on a label surface of an optical disk or in a specially-shaped printable area on nonstandard-sized paper.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a printer for personal use has been widely spread. A general user performs printing not only on standard-sized paper such as L size or A4 size paper of which a printable area has a rectangular shape, but also often on paper having a specially-shaped printable area. The paper having such specially-shaped printable area includes a label surface of an optical disk such as CD-R, special sticker paper to be stuck on an object surface, or nonstandard-sized postcard. There is also performed a printing procedure in which a vast number of digital images taken with a digital camera or digital video camera are stored in a personal computer, and some of the images are searched from these stored images for printing. For this purpose, there have been proposed a method for searching a print target image to be printed in the specially-shaped printable area, and a method for applying predetermined processing to a searched print target image to print it. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-018388 discloses a method comprising: inputting information in a field of a configuration template for an image layout format; searching an image to be laid out for each field; and automatically laying out the searched image. Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-167965 discloses a method comprising: automatically enlarging an image such that a part of the image is printed on an entire label surface of an optical disk upon printing of it on the label surface of the optical disk.
Upon searching the print target image from the vast number of images, searching efficiency can be improved if the following steps can be automatically performed, i.e., the steps of first removing images inappropriate to printing in a specially-shaped printable area, and then searching the print target image from images appropriate to printing in the specially-shaped printable area. However, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-018338, a user needs to specify the layout for the image on the basis of the printable area by him/herself. As a result, if there are a plurality of layouts for the image adapted for the printable area, the user also needs to specify a plurality of search conditions, and therefore such setting operation by the user becomes complicated. Also, the user makes the setting by him/herself, so that it may be difficult to specify the layouts for all images adapted for the printable area. In Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-167965, if a print target image is edited (enlarged or reduced) on the basis of a user's preference, the image may protrude out of a printable area as a result of the enlargement even if the image prior to the edition fits into the printable area. As described, such conventional techniques have a problem that the print target image adapted for the specially-shaped printable area cannot be simply searched from the vast number of images.